<Language> Re: Caucasus and Kaska

Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl
Wed Jan 27 12:35:08 UTC 1999


"H. Mark Hubey" <HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu> wrote:

>1. The SAn lived in North-East AFrica and were pushed south by Bantu
>speakers (West Africans)

What's North-East Africa?  There may be some genetic evidence for
San in the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia), in which case they
were linguistically displaced there by Afro-Asiatic speakers.
There are *no* Bantu speakers in North-East Africa.  The Bantu
expansion started very recently, some 2,000 years ago, from the
Nigeria-Cameroon area into Central Africa (Congo), East Africa
(Kenya-Uganda-Tanzania) and eventually Southern Africa.

>2. The SAn are not "black" but "yellow" (reddish?, copper-colored after
>tanning?)

So?
	
>3. Egyptians painted themselves red (not black and not white)

If by this you're trying to suggest that the ancient Egyptians
were not San, you're right.

>4. The 1st wave out of Africa was probably 1-2 million years ago

Homo erectus?

>5. The earliest Neandertal bones in Europe are now 800,000 years old
>(Spain)

>6. The big problem is whether the 2nd wave out of Africa wiped out the
>Neandertals this is a problem in genetics, paleontology, etc

My understanding is that it is now pretty well established that
the Neanderthals are not ancestral to modern humans.

>7. Kabardian has 1 vowel. (other caucasian languages are poor in vowels
>and have lots of consonant clusters. So do IE languages. So do AA
>languages. So does Khoisan.

Kabardian doesn't have one vowel.  Neither did PIE or PAA.
Neither does any Khoisan language.

>8. Lieberman says that Neandertals could not speak. Then he changes his mind
>and says that they would not be able to speak like us but would speak like
>little children and could not make the "supervowel i".

>9. mtDNA test say that "Eve" as African.  Y-chromosome test say that "Adam"
>was African; Sudanese, Ethiopean and Khoisan.

>Questions: if Neandertals could not make vowels like us, what kind of a
>language would they have had?

No way to know.

> If the Khoisan lived in Africa for 1-2
>million years why are they yellow instead of black?

They weren't living in the African rainforests?

>Why is the fault
>line of consonant-clustered languages run south from the CAucasus down
>the ME to EAst Coast of Africa? What is all this saying?

I don't know.  Sounds meaningless.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam



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